COMMENTARY ON THE SIBEL EDMONDS STORY FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST

Sibel Edmonds Speaks...

By Larisa Alexandrovna

Posted January 6, 2008 | 03:18 PM (EST)

Sibel Edmonds, the FBI whistle-blower who has been gagged for years by the Bush administration over intercepts she translated while at the bureau, was willing to go to prison to get her story told. She spent years trying to get her day in court, but the State Secrets gag against her prohibited her from telling her story even to a FISA judge. After years of trying to fight her way to through the maze of the US court system, Sibel Edmonds finally decided to tell her story no matter the consequences and offered to do so to any interested US media outlets.
Today, part of that story runs, but not in the United States, where not a single corporate outlet was willing to displease the White House and give Edmonds a platform. The Sunday Times Online, however, proved up to the task - somewhat.

Here are the snips from that article:

"A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.



Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official - who has held a series of top government posts - is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: "He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives."

Let me help the Times here.

The person against whom these allegations are being made is Marc Grossman.

The Times could have published the name and also provided the denial from Grossman's camp. I find it incredibly disturbing that they would not name the official.

"She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials - including household names - who were aiding foreign agents.

"If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials," she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology."

Those senior DOD officials who are not mentioned in the Times article, all but one are no longer in government. They are alleged to be Doug Feith, Richard Perle, among others. There is also one person who is part of these allegations, still serving in a high level position at the DOD. His last name begins with an E.

I have tried getting someone in broadcast and print media to run this story. My sources did not include Edmonds, but because of the sensitive nature of the information, I was concerned that she would go to jail anyway, unless I proved she was not a source - which would require me to reveal my sources.

I thought if I approached a big enough news outlet, the pressure generated by the public response would spare Edmonds jail time and I would not be pressured to reveal sources - something I would not have done anyway. Even a former high ranking CIA officer offered to byline the article with me if that would help sell a broadcaster/publication on running the story. No one was interested.

That the Times ran these allegations (she is under a state secrets gag folks, so it is not like she is gagged for lying) is encouraging. But that they omitted all names from the allegations is unethical. The point of a free press is not to protect the powerful against the weak, but to protect the public from the powerful. The Times was willing to stick a toe in, but was not willing to risk upsetting a foreign government (This is, after all, a British paper).

There are more names, including members of Congress and people serving in the FBI. This is what happens when basic government services as well as the most sensitive government functions are outsourced to the global marketplace.

Back to the Times article, which toward the end illustrates that someone in the editorial offices located a backbone, even if temporarily:

"She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities' failure to act.

One of Edmonds's main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.



The Turks and Israelis had planted "moles" in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. "The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States," she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles - mainly PhD students - with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

Let me again offer help to the good folks at the Times. The person in question is a Turkish military official who at that time also happened to sit on the board of a particular defense contracting firm.

"The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: "I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more."

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief."

Now, who is General Mahmoud Ahmad?

"Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks."

You can see why Edmonds had to be silenced for "diplomatic reasons." As though diplomatic (read: business) relationships are more important than national security. Let me give you one more snip from this incredible article (minus the censorship):

"Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan's nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. "We were aware of contact between A Q Khan's people and Al-Qaeda," a former CIA officer said last week. "There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end."

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. "A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, 'We need to get them out of the US because we can't afford for them to spill the beans'," she said. "The official said that he would 'take care of it'."

Read the whole thing. I urge you to print it, email it, share it with everyone you know. Edmonds has said enough now that she may very likely go to prison, but she is a true patriot and she must have our support, in the media and also in the public sphere.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/sibel-edmonds-speaks_b_80077.html

Protection for Endangered Whistle-Blowers
The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday 27 December 2007
Congress is finally ready to stand up to the Bush administration and for those courageous federal workers who dare to reveal waste and abuse in government. The Senate has passed strong reforms to the 1989 whistle-blower protection law, counteracting the gag orders, retaliatory investigations and other harassments that have become shamefully standard practice during the last seven years.
The reforms would provide stronger outside review protection for whistle-blowers and would make it more difficult for their security clearances to be revoked, a common shunning device. Workers would also be freer to share classified information with Congress - when necessary to reveal the details of abuse and fraud - and would have a strengthened court review process for appealing disputed cases.
More than 400 workers a year make firsthand allegations of on-the-job waste and fraud, risking their careers in the process. In response, too many administration political appointees have flouted the law, demoting and demeaning workers who speak up, even subverting the inspector general system in the process.
The House has passed an even stronger version, and negotiators will begin meeting soon after Congress returns. The White House, predictably, is threatening a veto. Both chambers of Congress have registered a veto-proof commitment, and the next priority should be to steer the strongest possible final measure into law.
In particular, conferees must include House provisions extending whistle-blower protection to workers at the F.B.I. and national intelligence agencies. White House complaints that homeland defense would be threatened are, in fact, contradicted by the history of 9/11 and the F.B.I. field agent whose preattack warnings to superiors went unheeded. Also vital is the House's guarantee of protection of airport baggage screeners, extending the right to reveal misconduct and antiterrorism gaffes without fearing for their jobs. The House would extend this protection to private government contractors, as well - a rich area of abuse laid bare in the management of the Iraq war. Clearly, these times demand the strongest possible whistle-blower law.
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Congressional Crackdown on Lobbying Is Already Showing Cracks
By David M. Herszenhorn
The New York Times
Thursday 03 January 2007
Washington - The party sponsored by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States to celebrate the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, at the New York Yacht Club was one of the more over-the-top events of the Republican National Convention in 2004, featuring 10 bars and more than a half-dozen special vintage Scotches. The group held a similar soiree that year for Senator Tom Daschle, the minority leader, at the Democratic Convention in Boston.
A broad new Congressional lobbying and ethics law that took effect on New Year's Day bans lawmakers from being honored at such events. But that hasn't stopped the council, which lobbies for the liquor industry, from exploiting a loophole that allows it to give similar parties at this year's political conventions - in Denver and Minneapolis - as long as they do not name any elected official as an "honoree," though many will be invited.
It is just one example of the creative interpretations of the new rules.
Congressional Democrats like to boast that the rules, in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, will go a long way toward ending the influence-peddling that has become common in American politics. But writing a strong law does not necessarily mean that strict interpretation and robust enforcement will follow.
One much-ballyhooed provision in the new law is being delayed indefinitely. Carrying out the requirement, that lawmakers disclose the names of lobbyists who "bundle," or gather campaign contributions, is being held up by a deadlock in the Senate over nominees to the Federal Election Commission.
Four of the election commission's six seats are vacant, leaving it unable to take any action like issuing new rules on how bundled contributions are to be disclosed or giving formal legal advice to presidential campaigns.
Good-government advocates say this highlights a point that they have harped on for years: strict regulations are useless without strict enforcement.
"Just like the campaign finance rules, the ethics laws mean little unless they are effectively enforced," said Don Simon, a Washington election lawyer who is counsel to the group Democracy 21. "And just as with the campaign finance laws where there has been a longstanding problem with lack of enforcement, so too, with the ethics rules."
On the ethics front, a special House task force last month called for creating an independent six-member panel to review accusations against lawmakers.
But critics have already rejected the recommendations for the empowerment of the proposed panel as too weak. It would have no subpoena power, and while it could dismiss accusations, credible charges would be referred to the existing Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, leaving final adjudication where it is now, in the hands of members of Congress policing themselves.
It was the standards committee that last month said lawmakers could attend parties at the conventions provided they were not named as honorees.
In its membership, the proposed House panel would look like the election commission, with three Republicans and three Democrats, though critics have long complained that the election commission routinely splits along partisan lines. The election commission's historically slow enforcement is one reason some supporters of the campaign finance rules are not pushing for its vacancies to be filled.
"The F.E.C. barely functions to begin with," said Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group.
Ms. McGehee said the group preferred to have the election commission functioning but considered it more important to prevent the re-appointment of Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who was first appointed by President Bush in January 2006 during a Senate recess.
Critics accuse Mr. von Spakovsky, a former Republican election official in Georgia, of trying to suppress the rights of minority voters while at the Justice Department, in part by supporting requirements that voters show photo IDs. Through a spokesman, Mr. von Spakovsky declined to comment.
The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has accused Democrats of trying to dictate whom the Republicans nominate and is insisting that all four nominees be voted on as a group. Democrats want separate votes in hopes of rejecting Mr. von Spakovsky.
"They're all four going to go together or none of them will be approved," Mr. McConnell said recently.
Emily A. Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, praised Mr. von Spakovsky and said the Senate should vote on the nominees "as a package."
The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said Mr. McConnell had refused his offer of simple-majority votes on each nominee because he knew Mr. von Spakovsky would be rejected.
Mr. Simon, the elections lawyer, said that crippling the commission during a major election year would undermine campaign finance laws.
"This kind of political deadlock weakens the law, at least in appearance," he said.
And Mr. Simon said that appearances seem to matter more than anything when it comes to ethics rules. He said, "Congress wants to take credit for passing reforms but then go into the back rooms and gut the reforms at the level of interpretation, implementation and enforcement."
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Justice Department Sets Criminal Inquiry on CIA Tapes
By Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston
The New York Times
Thursday 03 January 2008
Washington - Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Wednesday that the Justice Department had elevated its inquiry into the destruction of Central Intelligence Agency interrogation videotapes to a formal criminal investigation headed by a career federal prosecutor.
The announcement is the first indication that investigators have concluded on a preliminary basis that C.I.A. officers, possibly along with other government officials, may have committed criminal acts in their handling of the tapes, which recorded the interrogations in 2002 of two operatives with Al Qaeda and were destroyed in 2005.
C.I.A. officials have for years feared becoming entangled in a criminal investigation involving alleged improprieties in secret counterterrorism programs. Now, the investigation and a probable grand jury inquiry will scrutinize the actions of some of the highest-ranking current and former officials at the agency.
The tapes were never provided to the courts or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had requested all C.I.A. documents related to Qaeda prisoners. The question of whether to destroy the tapes was for nearly three years the subject of deliberations among lawyers at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Justice Department officials declined to specify what crimes might be under investigation, but government lawyers have said the inquiry will probably focus on whether the destruction of the tapes involved criminal obstruction of justice and related false-statement offenses.
Mr. Mukasey assigned John H. Durham, a veteran federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the criminal inquiry in tandem with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The appointment of a prosecutor from outside Washington was an unusual move, and it suggested that Mr. Mukasey wanted to give the investigation the appearance of an extra measure of independence, after complaints from lawmakers in both parties that Mr. Mukasey's predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales, had allowed politics to influence the Justice Department's judgment.
Mr. Durham was not appointed as a special counsel in this case, a step sought by some Congressional Democrats. He will have less expansive authority than a special counsel and will report to the deputy attorney general rather than assume the powers of the attorney general, which he would have had as a special counsel.
Mr. Durham has spent years bringing cases against organized crime figures in Hartford and Boston. In legal circles he has the reputation of a tough, tight-lipped litigator who compiled a stellar track record against the mob.
A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency would cooperate fully with the Justice Department investigation. Current and former officials have said that the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who at the time was the head of the agency's clandestine branch.
The decision to start a full-scale criminal investigation into the matter came four weeks after the disclosure on Dec. 6 that the tapes had been created and then destroyed. The Justice Department and the C.I.A. opened a preliminary inquiry on Dec. 8, and Mr. Mukasey said Wednesday that he had concluded from that review "that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter."
The chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, welcomed Mr. Mukasey's announcement. But neither gave any indication he would defer to the criminal inquiry, and in separate statements they pledged to proceed with their committees' investigations into the destruction of the tapes.
John L. Helgerson, the C.I.A. inspector general who took part in the preliminary inquiry, said Wednesday that he would step aside from the criminal investigation to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.
Mr. Helgerson's office had reviewed the videotapes, documenting the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, as part of an investigation into the C.I.A's secret detention and interrogation program. Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation into the program in early 2004.
Among White House lawyers who took part in discussions between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy the tapes were Mr. Gonzales, when he was White House counsel; Harriet E. Miers, Mr. Gonzales's successor as counsel; David S. Addington, who was then counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, then the legal adviser to the National Security Council. It is unclear whether anyone outside the C.I.A. endorsed destroying the tapes.
The new Justice Department investigation is likely to last for months, possibly beyond the end of the Bush administration.
Mr. Durham is currently the top-ranking deputy in the United States attorney's office in Connecticut, supervising all major felony cases brought in the state.
In the late 1990s he was assigned as a special attorney in Boston leading an inquiry into allegations that F.B.I. agents and police officers had been compromised by mobsters.
In taking over the inquiry, Mr. Durham is expected to be able to move ahead without a long delay because his team will include Justice Department prosecutors who have already been working on the case. But at least in the beginning, it is likely to proceed more slowly than parallel investigations on Capitol Hill that are already well under way. Investigators from the House Intelligence Committee last month reviewed C.I.A. documents related to the destruction of the tapes, and the committee has called government witnesses to testify at a hearing scheduled for Jan. 16.
Mr. Mukasey pointedly did not designate Mr. Durham as a special counsel, in effect refusing to bow to pressure from Congressional Democrats to appoint an independent prosecutor with the same broad legal powers that were given to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel who was appointed in 2003 to lead the investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity. That inquiry resulted in the perjury and obstruction prosecution of I. Lewis Libby Jr., formerly Mr. Cheney's chief of staff. After Mr. Libby's conviction, President Bush commuted his sentence.
Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed after the attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, determined that his own relationship with officials under possible scrutiny in the leak case forced him to recuse himself from the investigation. As special counsel, Mr. Fitzgerald had the authority of the attorney general for the matters under investigation.
Mr. Durham will report to the deputy attorney general, an office being held temporarily by Craig S. Morford. Mr. Durham will have the powers of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction that includes C.I.A. headquarters. If a grand jury is convened as expected, it will meet in Alexandria, Va., where the prosecutor's office is located.
Mr. Mukasey said "in an abundance of caution" the office of United States attorney for the district, Chuck Rosenberg, had been recused from the case and would not take part in the inquiry. Mr. Rosenberg's office has investigated cases of detainee abuse by C.I.A. employees and contractors and has worked closely with the C.I.A. on counterterrorism and espionage cases.
Mr. Mukasey said the decision was made "to avoid any possible appearance of a conflict with other matters handled by that office." Appointments like Mr. Durham's are sometimes made in cases in which prosecutors like Mr. Rosenberg have recused themselves.
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Wednesday, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, the chairman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said they believed that C.I.A. officials had deliberately withheld the tapes from the commission. They suggested that since the commission received its authority from both Congress and President Bush, any deliberate withholding of evidence might have violated federal law.
"Those who knew about those videotapes - and did not tell us about them - obstructed our investigation," they wrote.
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Twin Cities / Former FBI agent's attorneys to get $1M
U.S. to pay fees after losing sex bias case
BY TAD VEZNER
Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated: 01/04/2008 11:13:20 PM CST

The U.S. government was ordered to pay more than $1 million in court fees to the legal team supporting an FBI agent who sued the bureau for retaliating against her after she filed a sexual discrimination claim.

Jane Turner, 56, of St. Paul, who is now retired, was awarded $360,000 by a Minneapolis jury in February for actions taken against her by a supervisor while she was an agent in North Dakota in the late 1990s. The FBI appealed the case, which began in 2000, then dropped its appeal in August.

This week, Chief U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum in Minneapolis concurred with the written recommendation of U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan to award $1,016,000 to Turner's legal team. The sum includes $705,000 to Washington-based Kohn Kohn & Colapinto LLP; $108,000 to Minneapolis-based Hill & Associates; $123,000 to Klimaski & Associates, Turner's original Washington legal team; and $17,000 to Metcalf Kaspari Howard Engdahl & Lazarus P.A., Klimaski's local counsel.

Rosenbaum also awarded Turner an additional $62,852 in out-of-pocket expenses used to support her case.
Turner's attorneys originally requested about $1.46 million in fees. The government argued the fees were excessive in terms of the number of hours billed and the hourly rate - in Kohn's case, $500 an hour.
While Boylan cut some of the billed hours, he noted the rate was appropriate.

"On a national level, there is likely a dearth of attorneys and law firms willing to tackle a case such as this one," Boylan wrote. "It could well be anticipated that Ms. Turner's case would not be just another employment action, and indeed, such an anticipation was borne out as this matter unfolded."
Turner worked for more than a decade as a senior resident agent in Minot, N.D., focusing on crimes against children. After filing a sexual discrimination claim in 1998 against her immediate supervisor, Turner received an "unacceptable" review. Before the filing, she had received "superior" and "exceptional" reviews. She was transferred to Minneapolis in 2000 and left the bureau in 2003.
In 2002, Turner accused a fellow Minneapolis agent of taking a Tiffany crystal globe from the wreckage of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In a 2003 report, the Department of Justice's inspector general found misconduct on the FBI's part.
In a second case, Turner has alleged retaliation for her whistle-blowing in relation to the Tiffany globe; that case is being reviewed by the Department of Justice.
Tad Vezner can be reached at tvezner@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5461.